Saturday, September 8, 2012

Fifty Two Brought to you by the Number Three

This post is brought to you by the number three.

In December 2009, I got an email from a friend of mine
informing me that our mutual friend, A., had passed away suddenly.A. and I graduated from the same high school.
While we were very close for some time, by the time I got this email, we had
been out of touch for some years. Still, it was shocking and very sad. Since I figured others would want to know, I
posted a notice on our high school class page on Facebook.Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Another high school classmate (who I do not
remember inthe slightest) commented on
my post.

ClassmateWow
I just read this. I know it's three years later but what happened

Gila WeissHe
had a massive heart attack. Wow-cannot believe it has been three years.

A week or so later, another friend of mine posted a link on
her Facebook page.She had become a
Zumba instructor and a local publication had written about her.When I wrote to congratulate her we had the
following exchange:

FriendGilale
- how are you ?? :) can you believe that Daughter #1 is starting her senior
year and Daughter #2 has just started collage... :) ??

The last time I had seen this friend and her daughters Daughter
#1 was just about to start her freshman year.Three years ago.

Three years.Three long
years, full of potential, opportunity and plans to exploit the potential and opportunity.
Three years which were instead spent
mostly working.My days were regularly peppered
with assurances to myself.“Once you
finish this project, once the deal closes, once the bookkeeper starts, once
thisthatortheother happens--work will get easier and you will have time for a
life”.It never happened. Things always took
longer than expected and if they did not (or even if they did) there was always
another project. The last year has been particularly vicious—nights and
weekends spent glued to my computer, my vacation postponed twice and finally converted
into a working vacation, plan after plan cancelled and my friends neglected.I bought a new dining room table last
December thinking that this would be perfect for entertaining. To date, three
of my friends have seen it and only one has eaten at it.

To make matters worse, I have developed wretched habits in
the form of a near-addiction to the internet.When I am not actually working I am obsessively surfing the net.
Because, hey, I am going to work 14 hours anyway—don’t I deserve a few minutes
to unwind with Yahoo? Checking out Facebook? Reading Wickipedia entries?
Looking up whatever stupid question pops into my head?Now I KNOW that this is a terrible and
unhealthy habit, in particular given how many hours I work. Here as well, I have
the best of intentions.I am going to
cut back because look at how much time I am wasting!Why, with that 30 minutes I spent dithering
on Facebook over my breakfast I could have gotten a quick morning workout!With that 60 minutes I spent last night
aimlessly reading up on actors I have never heard of and movies I have no
interest in, I could have let myself relax with a few rows of knitting before I
went to bed AND gone to bed on time. Really, if I didn’t surf at all I would be
so much more efficient.But…I just want
to take a quick look. Really, five minutes.Which stretches into ten or
twenty.

In short, a shocking, not to mention very unhealthy,
portion of my life is spent in front of a computer. And when I’m not actually spending
my life working or surfing the net, I’m agonizing obsessively about the fact
that I am spending my life working or surfing the net.

Such obsession can reach a fever pitch under the right circumstances.
Say, for instance that:

Rosh Hashana is right
around the corner

My birthday is right around
the corner

I just updated my annual
plan and realized I accomplished very little that I set out to do the previous
year

I have been assaulted by
various instances of the number three.

In such an instance as described above, I am liable to find
myself grappling with a Crisis of Epic Proportions.“Three years have gone by”, I declare to myself,
“THREE WHOLE YEARS in which I have done NOTHING but work. I are going to keel over and die from a heart
attack, and all anyone will be able to say about me is that I worked a lot. Gila,
you have thrown those three years into the garbage!And then you waste the little free time you
have on drivel!You could be writing a
novel—slowly but surely, a page a day. You could be volunteering! You could be
fundraising for Alyn Hospital Wheels of Love Ride-it’s right around the corner! You could be spending time
with friends.And instead, what do you
do? You spend your precious free time reading up on Honey Boo Boo! For fuck’s
sake woman, you don’t watch reality TV!You don’t even have cable!The last time you turned on your TV at all was five months ago!Why do
you care about Honey Boo Boo?You are
wasting your life! “

Overstated?Well, yes.But completely ridiculous? No. There is a
healthy chunk of truth to my histrionics. My life is out of balance.My habits are crap.And life is short and sometimes shorter than
we think.So, yes, something needs to be
done.But what?

And this, Friends, is why G-d invented Facebook.

Call
out to my friends! Your suggestions are needed.

So
here is the deal. I have been feeling rather stuck—I keep on stumbling upon
cases where I am reminded of something that happened 3-4 years ago and thinking
“wow-I’ve done nothing in the last 3-4 years! Aside from work!” And I’m
freaking out.

So,
my birthday is coming up and I will be 42 (auspicious, no?) and I thought, why
not give myself an interesting present—one ‘health’ commitment for my new year.
Health here is defined broadly—it can be physical, mental, spiritual, etc. The
one major condition is that it should force me to do/learn/try something new,
continuously, over the course of the year. So “actually go to the dentist
instead of just making appointments and breaking them”, while recommended, does
not qualify. “Be a vegetarian for a year”, while liable to kill me, would
qualify as my vegetarian repertoire would have to expand beyond Pakistani dahl,
pasta and 5% white cheeses.

“Skip the first two sections
of Eat Pray Love, go to the END and find yourself a Man. Forget food, religion,
education, get laid my friend…a lot…by someone who knows what he is
doing”.(This contribution is courtesy
of Ellie, who also pointed out that this would dovetail nicely with the
vegetarian option, as sperm has lots of protein. That’s Ellie for you. So practical.).

In the end, I decided on the following:

Fifty two Field Trips in Fifty Two Weeks. A field trip can be a
bike ride somewhere more exotic than up to Yad Kennedy. It can be a
lecture.It can be a cooking class.It can be a krav mega with Kayla. It can be a
bike ride or a hike along a section of the Israel Trail. It can be the zoo with
one of my mommy friends and her kids.In
short, it can be damn near anything that 1) gets me out of the house 2) is
something I do not normally do and 3) is not work related.And 4) while I can research it before and (if I get to it) write
it up after, it cannot involve my computer.

Be vegetarian for the year, though I can have one meat meal for
every Shabbat and Hag. I’ve already ordered the cookbook and have a date with a
friend to start picking recipes for experimentation.

So let's assume I stick to this. Worst
case scenario—at the end of next year, I have a list of 52 things I can point
at and say “I did this” and I have learned how to subsist on nuts, grains and berries.

First of all, it's great to see you blogging again. I missed your unique perspective. Second, I have done something similar to your 52-week challenge, based on Julia Cameron's artist dates ("The Artist's Way," 1992). However, lately I seem to have lost my focus, and basically can be found plopped down in front of my computer. I am very inspired by your plan, and (bli neder) am going to try to follow your example in 5773. Lynne

Enjoy the 52 trips! Chana has kind of imposed a similar g'zeira on me - "Super Sunday" outings with the kids, both to increase positive family time and to have something else she can take away from them if they misbehave. :-)

Dear Gila,I found your blog almost by a chance. For your information, there is an effective way of treatment and extraction of shrapnel and other ferrous particles which enter in human body as the result of trauma and it is used here in Serbia for more than 20 years, but it is obvious that your doctors have no knowledge about it.

New to My Shrapnel? Start at the beginning:

About Me

Message from the Bombing Victim Muppet

I am, of course, neither sad, nor heroic nor particularly victimized. What I am is an "ordinary Joe" who was seriously injured six years ago in a suicide bombing while waiting for a bus at the Machane Yehuda open air market in Jerusalem.

Ever since I learned how to write, writing has served as a sort of therapy for me. In the months and years after the bombing, I did an enormous amount of writing. What I was thinking. What I was feeling. How the world reacted to me. How my bombed-out self reacted to the world. Some of the articles were sent to friends and relatives via email lists. Many more of them just sat on my computer. I always meant to do something with them.

Of course, I never got around to it.

This year, I promised myself that I would, at last do something. And since blogging is the best way to do something without having to do all that much (no publishers, no rejections, no work apart from editing), I decided that this was the way to go.

Please comment. I am putting these out so that people will read them. Let me know that you are reading.